The Carleton University Students’ Association has managed to attract quite a bit of controversy in the last couple of days, and a lot of it can be blamed on some misunderstandings of parliamentary procedure.

To quickly summarize, CUSA Council adopted a resolution on Monday evening to work to select a new charity for their orientation week, to replace the Shinerama fundraiser for the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. The part that caused all the news coverage was in the preamble, which suggested that “cystic fibrosis has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men,” and which is factually false according to reliable sources.¹

The misunderstandings of parliamentary procedure come into play when examining the following excerpt from a CTV.ca article on the story (emphasis mine):

[CUSA president Brittany Smyth] said that the part of the motion that refers to why Shinerama has been cancelled is irrelevant, not part of the official meeting record and simply reflects the rationale of the councillor who raised the motion.

“It completely depends on the individual,” Smyth told CTV.ca. “It’s 100 per cent their opinion. Their opinion doesn’t have to be fact or anything really. It’s just how this individual felt.”

Only the resolution is important, Smyth said, even though it appears councillors are endorsing the idea that support of cystic fibrosis be stopped because it is a white-man’s disease.

“Speaking from the council perspective, the whereas motions weren’t actually overly relevant when people were making a decision on what they wanted to do,” Smyth said.

She also pointed out that the whereas clauses cannot be amended, and said if a resolution to drop Shinerama had been rejected, the issue could not have been raised again.¹

Each of the emphasized phrases reveals a mistaken belief about the rules. And, before we proceed too far in this analysis, it should be noted that CUSA rules provide that “Council proceedings shall be governed by Robert’s Rules of Order except as amended by the Constitution and Bylaws.”²

The first major misunderstanding, as displayed in several of the emphasized phrases in the excerpt, is that the preamble of a resolution (also known as the “whereas” clauses) is irrelevant, unimportant, or not actually part of the resolution. In fact, the opposite is true: the preamble is definitely part of the resolution, and by adopting the resolution with the preamble, the Council is officially stating, on the record, that it agrees with the preamble and that the reasons specified in the preamble are the reasons the motion was adopted.³

Second, the president states that the preamble cannot be amended, implying that writing the preamble is the prerogative of the maker of the motion. This is also completely false, as the preamble is always fully amendable. In fact, there is a rule that the preamble remains open to debate and amendment, even if the previous question is ordered on the motion to adopt the resolution. The Council would need to have ordered the previous question first on the resolution, and then separately on the preamble, to cut off debate and amendment.⁴

Third, we see the mistaken belief that if the motion were defeated, the issue could not be raised again. While it is true that to reject the motion would preclude substantially the same motion from being introduced again at the same meeting,⁵ it would not prevent a reconsideration of the motion at the same meeting,⁶ nor would it in any way affect the freedom of the members to introduce motions, including the same motion, at future meetings.⁵

Overall, I’m not convinced that following proper parliamentary procedure would have saved these student leaders from the embarrassment of the controversy they have created here, but it would certainly have permitted a more free and open discourse on Monday evening. Perhaps given the ability to amend the preamble, or the confidence to vote down the resolution, things would have gone much better for them.

1. ”Fundraiser canned on claims disease affects only whites.” CTV.ca. 25 Nov. 2008. CTVglobemedia Inc. 26 Nov. 2008 <http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/ CTVNews/20081125/carleton_fundraiser_081125/>. [↩] [↩]
2. ”Council Meeting Procedures Policy.” §1.1. The policies of the Carleton University Students’ Association Carleton University Students’ Association. 26 Nov. 2008 <http://www.cusaonline.com/Downloads/cusa_policies_08.pdf>. [↩]
3. RONR (10th ed.), p. 102 [↩]
4. RONR (10th ed.), p. 103, 133, and 269 [↩]
5. RONR (10th ed.), p. 326 [↩] [↩]
6. RONR (10th ed.), p. 304 [↩]